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The Politics of Urban Leaseholds in Late Victorian England (0 D. A. REEDER THE POLITICS OF URBAN LEASEHOLDS IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND (0 The prestige of the landlord class, which had stood so high in the long period of prosperity of the mid-Victorian years, fell to its lowest point in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From the early 1880's landowners were attacked by politicians and land reformers in Parliament, in the Press and in a welter of literature on various aspects of the land question. At the same time there was a revival in the membership and activities of land organisations many of which had been started in the land agitation of the early 1870's only to go down before the onset of the Great Depression.2 The main cause of the widespread feelings of hostility towards landowners was economic: the instability of trade and employment and the effects of falling profit margins on the outlook and standards of expenditure of businessmen. The conflict of economic interests between landlords, businessmen and workers was expressed in the language of class war. Radicals of the Liberal Party took advantage of the increased support given to them by the business and professional classes to renew their campaign against the landowning aristocracy. They carped at the wealth of landowners and pointed to the burden of rents and royalties which lay on the enterprise of farmers and mineowners. They contrasted the relatively fixed incomes of landowners with the falling rate of return on industrial investments. Turning away from moderate reforms designed to improve the transfer and development of estates, they pronounced that the chief burden on the land was not the law but 1 I wish to thank Dr. H. J. Dyos for critically reading this paper. 2 Roy den Harrison, The Land and Labour League, in: Bulletin of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Vol. VIII (1953), Part. 3. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 28 Sep 2021 at 10:43:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001917 I). A. REEDER the landlord himself.1 Along with socialists and other land reformers they offered to the people either the land, or part of the income from the land, as a practical solution to many of the social and economic ills arising from industrialisation and town life. There were times in the 1880's when events seemed to bear out the prophecy made by Bradlaugh a decade before that "it will be on the Land Question that large sections of the English aristocracy which regards the preser- vation of territorial rights and privileges as essential to good govern- ment, will shortly have to encounter a stronger foe, and to cope with a wider movement than has been manifested in England during the last two hundred years".2 One aspect of these complaints against landlordism which has been neglected in the general histories of the times was the attention paid to the ownership and holding of land in towns.3 The first politician to give public notice of the existence of an urban land problem was Henry Broadhurst, the Liberal-Labour M.P. As he told his consti- tuents at Hanley in 1883: "Up to the present time the land question has to a great extent been thought to be almost exclusively a rural question, and so far as we have gone we have never ascertained that there was a great and growing evil and injustice in our towns and suburban districts vitally affecting the welfare of our tradesmen, as well as of our working classes, called the leasehold system".4 From this time on a large part of the propaganda directed against landlords included a protest about the use of building leases drawn up for 99 years or even less. There were three main reasons why radicals, socialists and land reformers of all shades of opinion, singled out the town holdings of landowners for particular comment. First, the prevalence of leasehold land, especially in London, was a forcible reminder of the concen- 1 The Radical Programme, in: Fortnightly Review, XXXVIII (1885), pp. 123-35. This should be contrasted with the traditional programme of "free trade in land" put forward by John Kay, brother of Kay Shuttleworth and Liberal M.P. for Salford until his death in 1878, G. C. Brodrick, the leading writer of the Cobden Club and the economist Thorold Rogers. 2 Charles Bradlaugh, The Land, the People and the Coming Struggle (1872?), p. 3. 3 This is basely noticed, for example, in the account of the land question in H. M. Lynd, England in the Eighteen Eighties (1945). 4 Leaseholds Enfranchisement (1883), p. 3. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 28 Sep 2021 at 10:43:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001917 URBAN LEASEHOLDS IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND 41 5 tration of land in the hands of aristocratic owners.1 The abuses of monopoly power were now illustrated by showing how restricted was the liberty of townspeople to own their homes.2 The argument was reinforced by reference to the way in which landowners had enclosed or tried to enclose for building purposes those common lands which had so far avoided the advancing army of villas.3 Secondly, it was realised that repairing leases were the means by which landowners brought their rents into line with rising land values. The charge here was that the landowners had done nothing to increase the value of their land. They had not physically converted their manor parks into a suburb nor had they supplied many of the amenities for these areas. Paving, lighting and the like were normally the responsi- bility of the local authorities. The landlords, from this viewpoint, were the residual legatees of the improvements made by others. The rents which they drew from their town holdings seemed to be conclusive proof of the justice of the verdict of John Stuart Mill that the landowner was a "sinecurist quartered on the land". The Fabians drove the point home when they protested in 1892 that the "princely gift of the London workmen to the London landlords in net unearned increment had increased the value of London by one-third in twenty years".4 It was as much the wealth of the town aristocracy as the difficulties of the rural population which accounts for the remarkable impact on political opinion of the doctrine of Henry George that the Single Tax on land values was the answer to economic inequalities. Lastly, through their town holdings the landowners were connected directly with a number of housing problems. The opponents of town landlords did not hesitate to accuse them of victimisation, of drawing 1 "Freehold may have comprised about a third of the residential property in London in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the proportion of homes which were occupied by their owners was much smaller than this". For the evidence on which this statement is based and an analysis of the development of building estates in one part of London, see H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb. A Study of the growth of Camberwell (Leicester, 1961), pp. 85-113. 2 See, for example, A. Wallace, Land Nationalisation (1906), pp. 116 et seq. 3 Some London radicals actively supported the Society for the preservation of Commons and Open Spaces. Even Punch made a typically barbed jest during 1884 at the expense of landowners by imagining the accumulation of property taken to its ultimate term in a hundred years time with one Noble Duke the perpetual ground landlord of the entire kingdom. The Survival of the Fittest, in: Punch, iz April, 1884, pp. 170-1. 4 Quoted C. Bauer, Modern Housing (1955), p. 25. See the calculation of Sydney Webb given in evidence before the Select Committee on Town Holdings, Parl. Papers, 1890 (341), XVIII. For the land organisations set up to campaign specifically for the taxation of land values see F. Verinder, The Great Problem of our Great Towns(i9o8). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 28 Sep 2021 at 10:43:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000001917 4l6 t>. A. REEDER rents from slum property and of obstructing the work of slum clearance and the improvement of streets. The political importance of urban leaseholds was not merely that they were cited by reformers in order to strengthen the case for sweeping changes in the ownership of land. In addition to this, some radicals, most of whom represented London constituencies, set out to organise behind them a discontented tenantry of leasehold houses, shops and business premises. Their object was to channel the agitation against leaseholds into a movement which, though ostensibly intended at improving the legal standing of town lessees, in reality aimed at abolishing the leasehold system altogether. Such was the movement to enfranchise leaseholds. The rest of this paper explores the history of the demand for leasehold enfranchisement first as an ingredient in the local politics of London and some other cities and then as an item in the programme of the Liberal party. II Architects and others interested in building standards had maintained, from the late eighteenth century, that building leases were normally drawn up for such short terms in London that they attracted the worst type of speculative builder.
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